volution of plant and animal life, or they supply no
such testimony. Professor Downing of Chicago University, says that this
is indeed, the one primary argument for evolution, the rest being simply
corroborative. On this _rock_ evolutionists build their scientific
Faith. Let us investigate.

We shall note, to begin with, that there are, indeed, a larger number of
species, both of animals and plants, preserved in the rocks,--thousands,
in fact. There are lowly organisms, of the crab and cuttle fish variety,
and more highly organized forms, fishes and birds, and there are the
prints and fossilized bones of great monsters, huge lizards and sloths
and other mammalia. It is possible to establish a gradation in this great
catalog of fossils, beginning with the largest or most perfectly
developed, and ending with the animals lower in the scale of life; or
vice versa. The evolutionists say, _vice versa,_ the simplest first, the
most complex last, and then they add: _So_ they have developed.

At this point we shall first quote one of the earliest palaeontologists,
and one of the most famous, Hugh Miller, whose _"Old Red Sandstone,"_
first published in 1841, has now been republished in the _"Everyman
Library."_ In this brilliant work, Miller pays his respects to the
evolutionists of his age. He refers to Lamarck and says: "The ingenious
foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a
certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened,
and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to
their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from
the inferior order of being towards the superior, and that the off-spring
of creatures low in the scale in the present time may hold a much higher
place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand
years hence. . . . He has argued on this principle of improvement and
adaptation,--which, carry it as far as we rationally may, still leaves
the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog,--that in the vast course
of ages, inferior have risen into superior natures, and lower into higher
races; that molluscs and zoophytes have passed into fish and reptiles,
and fish and reptiles into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed gelatinous
bodies, with an organisation scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed
into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed
into human creatures, capable